MISSION and HISTORY

Our mission is to use arts activism, creativity and cultural production to liberate the ways people love, experience the Erotic, and connect to the Sacred. We provide spaces for the exhibition and exploration of sensual awareness, sexual consciousness, erotic power, and pleasure as well as gathering places for people engaged in sexual empowerment to express themselves and enjoy erotic events, demonstrations, and sexuality-related classes.

Our vision is a network of communities, groups, and individuals who are committed to sexual empowerment and erotic liberation. We envision the creation of sexual culture communities within which all of who we are is affirmed, nurtured, and caressed. We envision a global village in which hegemonies and structural inequality based upon gender, sexual identity, class, skin color, physicality, and ethnicity are rendered obsolete so that we can create sexual-sociocultural lives that are sustaining to our souls and affirming of our spirits.

We are committed to social justice and ecological wellbeing and hold the following values:

Respect for differences

Conflict is an opportunity to learn

We are all responsible all the time

Everyone matters always

Dr. Herukhuti founded the Center for Culture, Sexuality and Spirituality in 2003, when it was initially called Black Funk. Prior to Black Funk, Dr. Herukhuti organized erotic events and facilitated workshops on sensuality, intimacy and the Erotic. Black Funk became a formal way of providing engaging, transformative and entertaining sex education. Based in Fort Greene, Brooklyn NY, Black Funk hosted a number of successful events and classes including The Workshop, a weekly sex party, Sensual Yoga, a weekly nude yoga class, and Erotic Fight Club, a monthly amateur wrestling club. Black Funk also hosted a popular Yahoo! discussion group.

With an expanded mission in 2012, Black Funk became the Center for Culture, Sexuality and Spirituality.